Facundo (Vivilización o barbarie)

Facundo Vivilizaci n o barbarie Ostensibly a biography of the gaucho barbarian Juan Facundo Quiroga Facundo is also a complex passionate work of history sociology and political commentary and Latin America s most important essa

Title: Facundo (Vivilización o barbarie)

Author: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

ISBN: null

Page: 171

Format: Paperback

Ostensibly a biography of the gaucho barbarian Juan Facundo Quiroga, Facundo is also a complex, passionate work of history, sociology, and political commentary, and Latin America s most important essay of the nineteenth century.

One thought on “Facundo (Vivilización o barbarie)”

There are relative few works of politics and history that can be regarded as great literature. Offhand, I can think of Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Tacitus, Gibbon, Brazil's Euclides da Cunha -- and now I must add to this list Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, scholar, educator, and one-time President of Argentina. Written in 1845, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism tells of the civil war that erupted soon after Argentina declared (and won) its independence from Spain. On one side were the gaucho ca [...]

Sarmiento makes some cool points. He plays a huge role in Argentine history and is responsible for many wonderful aspects of Argentine culture, but ultimately I get the feeling he was just kind of a snobby old racist who hated anyone who wasn't a white european wannabe.

I agree with his criticisms of Rosas, but comparing gauchos to arabs to imply that they, aborigins and Spaniards are uncivilized as opposed to Anglo-Saxons and Frenchmen is taking things a bit too far. The prose was dense and not engaging at all. It's even funnier to find that he and Quiroga were distantly related. Basically, if there's something I share with Sarmiento is my grumpy lack of comformism towards these who hold power. But, nothing much. He was pretty much your "progressive", black le [...]

What a gallery of rogues is presented here, more than enough to make anyone thank their lucky stars they were not born in Argentina in the first half of the 19th centuryd what a fascinating picture Sarmiento paints, of the life of the gaucho on the pampas, contrasted with cities like Cordova - haunted by superstition and the tread of the Inquisition - or outward looking, sophisticated, mercantile Buenos Aires.d the interplay of faction, so we get a feel for how the different backgrounds of the p [...]

Guachos! Caudillos! These South American cowboys and barbarians are such fucking men. Best passage of the book: when the guacho, with the "gristled visage of an Arab" stands, holding a poncho in one hand--with which to thrust into the maw of the beast--and a dagger in the other, so that when the tiger leaps the guacho stands strong and stone-facedly transfixes the heart of the great cat with his dagger.The rest of the book is pretty boring. Some kind of history/geography lesson about Argentina, [...]

A book filled with somewhat uncomfortable insights to us latin americans, regarding politics in newly independent colonies during the first half of the nineteenth century. I found it brilliant, and can vaguely relate to other reviews labeling Sarmiento as "racist" or something similar, but there's hardly anything to discuss about the extremely lucid explanations he gives on the conflict of methodologies and paradigms when it comes to rule a city (or a whole country) or even wage war "a la americ [...]

“And it cannot be denied that terror, as a means of government, produces much larger results than patriotism or liberty. It is true that it degrades men, impoverishes them, and takes from them all elasticity of mind, but it extorts more from a state in one day than it would have given in ten years; and what does the rest matter to the Czar of Russia, the bandit chief, or the Argentine commander?”

I din't really get on with this very well. There were some interesting bits about the history of Argentina which makes me want to read more but most of the book seems to be a character assassination of nearly everyone who was in a position of power in Argentina in the first few decades of the 19th century. Facundo himself comes across as a real ogre to be compared to Hitler os Stalin or any other terrorising leader. He represented barbarism in the book but there seemed to be precious little to o [...]

I enjoyed reading this influential portrait of 19th-century Argentina from a man who was very much a part of it all: a fugitive from Juan Manuel Rosas' authoritarianism, an expatriate critic of Rosas, and eventual president of the country. He contrasts the civilization of the cities with the barbarism of the hinterlands, especially of the gauchos. As an Argentine liberal (19th-century style), he hoped to follow the pattern of Britain, France, and the United States, and lamented the Spanish, Afri [...]

I am currently a history major and took an Argentina class because I thought it would be interesting, this book was not interesting in the least. Sarmiento's book, Facundo, is during the revolutionary stage in Argentina. There is to much emphasis placed on trying to describe in great detail mundane things while not getting to the important issues at hand. On the parts that I thought would be of the utmost importance they were explained in very vague terms which half the time I did not know what [...]

Sarmiento is a well-respected founding father of Argentina. This text in translation is a fascinating account of one man's skewed perspective of life and politics in early 19th century Argentina. His arrogance reminds me of Benjamin Franklin. In fact, Sarmiento references Franklin as a role model. Sarmiento did amazing things for the progress of Argentina, just like Franklin did for the United States, but he was also a classist and a racist (just like Franklin?), and had no hope for anyone other [...]

Although racist and ignorant at its core, Sarmiento's commentary on poetry and sub-textual striving for a national identity is actually very fire. It pleases me greatly that he was so horrified at the barbarity of the gaucho because the gaucho later became a figure of the Argentinian identity. Joke's on you Sarmiento.